Brad Hurley
Forum Replies Created
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To me the most exciting application for the new iPad Pro is music, especially on-location recording. You can do that with a laptop, of course, but laptops have fans and if you’re in the same room as what you’re recording there’s always the worry that the fan will kick in and spoil it. An iPad pro with a Sonosax M2D2 preamp/interface might be the ultimate recording setup for world-class audio quality in a very portable package. You can record to the Apogee app or record and edit in Auria Pro.
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“Just really wanted to verify that from a quality standpoint, Optimized & Original will yield the same quality video.”
I would think it depends on what your original media are and what you use for optimized media. Final Cut transcodes to Prores 422 for optimized media. If your original media were, say, Prores 444 XQ or raw then you might see a difference using optimized media. If your original media were Prores 422 HQ you probably wouldn’t see a difference.
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“When finished i delete the Optimized Media and copy the entire library (Original & Proxy Media) to an external hard drive for another editor to make the highlight film.”
There’s a difference between optimized media and proxy media. You want optimized media when you need to do tasks like color grading/color correction, which will work much better on your Mac if you’re using Prores files (which is what Final Cut uses for optimized media). There should be virtually no loss in optical quality.
Proxy media are much smaller files, used to improve playback during editing or if you’re working on a large multicam project. You should see a noticeable decrease in image quality in proxy media, unlike with optimized media.
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One of the things that mystifies me about FCPX is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to set the timeline viewer gamma and therefore I don’t really know what I’m looking at. In Resolve, for example, if I want to deliver to the web I can select Rec709 gamma 2.2 for my timeline and I also set my calibrated reference monitor to those settings. These look entirely different from what I see in Quicktime, which is to be expected (Quicktime has well-documented gamma issues).
Gamma 2.2 is used for computer monitors and is the “brightest” and highest-contrast gamma you’d be using since computer monitors are normally used in brightly lit spaces such as offices. Gamma 2.4 has less contrast and appears a bit darker since it’s meant for HDTVs, which are usually viewed in darker locations like a living room in the evening. Cinema is gamma 2.6, I believe, which is viewed in entirely dark controlled environments. The choice of gamma makes a noticeable difference in your footage but I’ve never seen a way to specify that in FCPX the way you can in Resolve, although I haven’t looked very hard. I suspect Final Cut chooses the gamma for you based on the delivery destination when it comes time to render your project.
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“More importantly as production workflows favour more the lone wolf, having top quality finishing tools for both picture and sound integrated into such and affordable product will attract customers, mostly from Adobe I suspect.”
Agreed, although since Resolve facilitates collaboration it’s also possible to have Hollywood-style production workflows from department to department in Resolve. There was a post earlier this year on the Blackmagic Design forum from some guy at NBC Studios who convinced his team (editors, audio, etc.) to go 100% Resolve, although he didn’t do his research before they bought into the system and was experiencing lots of problems (mainly related to Windows and GPU issues).
As for Final Cut, there’s been a long silence from Apple on both the Final Cut and Logic Pro X fronts, which suggests they’re working on major updates. Who knows, the next release might be version 11 for both FCPX and Logic, but in any case it’ll be interesting to see if Apple tries to integrate Logic with FCPX in some way. There’s already superficial integration in the sense that Logic plugins are available to FCPX and Apple has tried to make it easier to work with FCPX exports in Logic, but the lack of a mixer in FCPX (and the lack of a simple solution for loudness metering that you could place on the master bus) could be addressed by integrating Logic (or elements of Logic) into FCPX.
I’ve seen some speculation that the new versions of FCPX and Logic could be released this month, but as the saying goes, “those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know.”
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I like glidecams, mainly because the footage looks a bit more natural and because it doesn’t require any batteries. I don’t have the Pocket 4K, but I have a rigged-up Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera that works really well on the top-of-the-line Devin Graham glidecam. I bought that version of the glidecam because it can carry more weight (I may eventually upgrade to an Ursa Mini) but mainly because it has only two adjustment knobs, which makes balancing a lot easier.
The Micro has a much more compact form factor than the Pocket 4K, but there’s quite a bit of side-to-side positioning available in the balancing plate of the glidecam; if its center of gravity is more to the right or left I would think you should still be able to balance it.
I use a relatively short prime wide-angle lens on my Micro when using it on the glidecam, and I mount the monitor on rails behind the camera to balance out the front-and-back weight. I tried mounting the monitor on the baseplate of the glidecam like you’re supposed to, but the monitor cable tends to get in the way or snag on things even if I tie it down.
There’s quite a bit of discussion on the Blackmagic Design user forum (in the Cinematography section) on gimbals for the Pocket 4k. A Google search should turn up most of those threads.
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Okay, and just to clarify one thing: when I mentioned that you can “solo” a track destination control I was getting track destination controls and auto-select buttons mixed up. The track destination controls allow you to control which video and audio track a clip will be added to when you place it in the timeline. Only one video track and one audio track can have active track destination controls.
The auto-select buttons, on the other hand, control what happens on the other tracks when you add or move a clip in the timeline. For example I’m sure you’ve experienced situations where you add a clip or split a clip in the timeline and it creates an unwanted split on a background music track: the auto-select buttons avoid that kind of problem by giving you total control over which tracks will be affected by edits, additions, or moves in the timeline.
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I really do think 120fps is going to be hard unless this is a very slow song.
One note about playback: in the thread I linked to above, the guy who has done this mentioned that playback changes the pitch but that’s easily avoided. Most DAWs will allow you to change playback speed independent of pitch, and even the free audio editor Audacity has this feature. If you’re playing back from a smartphone rather than a laptop, there are apps that can do this as well; the one I use on iOS is called Anytune Pro+, but I’m sure there are others.
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Looks like there are some useful tips from people who have done this here: https://cinematography.com/index.php?/topic/68759-slow-motion-syncing-in-music-videos/
Definitely a widely used technique in music videos, but it looks like the formula is 120 divided by 23.976, which works out to just over 5x. That’s probably going to be really challenging for the singer.
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I don’t think it’s any less intuitive to click on a destination control than to highlight a track. It’s the same thing, you’re just clicking on a button on a track header.
In Resolve, only one video track and one audio track can have their destination controls active. You get to choose which tracks: if you have 4 video tracks and 75 audio tracks, just click on the track destination control for the video track you want to use and click on the track destination control for the audio track you want to use. This is also useful for editing clips into the timeline when you want only the audio or only the video: just disable the destination track control for whatever audio track is currently enabled and the audio will have nowhere to go; only video will be added to the timeline.